It is that time feared by every parent since coaches and carriages gave way to combusting coupes and wagons. I am teaching my child how to drive. The youngest child, in this case, and unless I am called upon to teach a grandchild to navigate a car down the roadway-probably have jet packs and personal helicopters by then, right?-this is IT for me. Texas requires a drivers education course for all new drivers prior to licensure by the state, but schools don't teach driver's ed, unlike in Alabama. For those who don't want to pay several hundred dollars for a driving school (and who have the time or inclination to keep up with mandated tracking logs and tests) they offer a parent taught course, in which you pay about 50 bucks, download the forms, and do it yourself. Note: if you figure in the cost of printing out the booklet and the tests and the forms, which is gonna run to a new toner cartridge and a couple of hundred sheets of paper, I'll be lucky to break even on my money-saving scheme.
I had forgotten just how much is taken for granted when driving. I'm a stubborn old traditionalist, so I firmly believe in starting a kid on a manual transmission. Cause the time will come when that skill will be vital, and it better be there. My time came when Stacey and I were 2 hours away from home and she tore a contact and couldn't drive due to lack of depth perception. I got a crash course in grinding gears, downshifting, and stalling as a 2 hour drive turned into almost 4 torturous hours. There are a lot of things worse than driving down old highway 280 from Birmingham to Auburn and stalling out in Dadeville, but I never thought I was going to be able to get out of the parking lot of the old Hardee's right in the curve. You know, where you have to start from a redlight in gear sitting on a 30 degree slope?
Sarah has done so well-so far. She has it much easier than Andrew did 5 years ago, because since his learning days I have had the clutch replaced and it's now so smooth you can shift into first, tap the gas, and feather the pedal out as it engages smoothly. With Andrew, the pedal was so hard and unresponsive that the clutch was either engaged or disengaged, no middle ground. Consequently, it would rocket into gear under his untrained acceleration and we would screech away across the parking lot. Glad that Stacey handed off his training to me, and she wasn't there for those burnouts. Otherwise he would have been removed from the Motorcar Training Programme, forbidden ever to drive, and be taking a bus everywhere.
Pam, my oldest child and thus my first student, had it better than the other two-and worse. I made the mistake of showing her how to run a stick shift while on vacation in the woods one time, and she drove the two of us a shaky 1/2 mile in the old Isuzu Trooper when she was about 11 or 12. Not a popular choice with her mom, of course. When she did began driving, we no longer had a manual transmission so she did all her training on an automatic. Later on, when my brother moved to town, we got him to show her how to drive his manual gearbox Mazda pickup. I think she probably ground his gears about as badly as he ground mine when I showed him how to drive a stick years earlier, so I reckon we're even now. Never asked her how it went driving with him. He can either be extremely patient, or extremely nervous. Probably not EVER gonna ask her how it went....
Some of the best stories I have come from driving incidents. Like the time I strapped a Christmas tree to the roof of my old VW Camper. One of the old ones with the pop-up roof complete with a canvas cot in it that rolls out and side flaps that would do a tent proud. Those pop-ups are held in place with little rubber tabs, and the shelf-life on those little rubber tabs is defined as "until you subject them to any resistance." Once up to the top VW speed of 54 mph, the wind resistance stood that tree up like the mizzen-mast of a schooner, popped the tabs loose, and opened the pop top like a giant rotting canvas parachute. Which it more or less was. From the driver's seat, I felt the whoosh of air into this sail push me all over the road, and saw the tree twist over the side in a tangle of broken rope to be dragged behind until I managed to bring the whole mess to a halt. It was really fortunate that I had several people with me that night, because it took us all to get home. One holding the roof top down since the tab holders were ripped out. One hanging an arm out of the open sliding door to help hold the tree down to the roof. With my left hand out the driver's side window also holding the tree down, and feeling it try to stand up again every time I drove over 30 mph. The tree still held together, and it still had at least four more needles on it than Charlie Brown's Christmas tree, so everything was OK.
I should have learned my lesson about carrying crap on the roof, and maybe I did for a while, until we traveled with a baby about 10 years later. Had to have a crib, you see, and it wouldn't fit in the car. So I tied it nice and tight to the roof rack of the Trooper I had at the time. All the way there, 200+ miles, and no incidents. I suppose I tempted fate, because within 20 miles of beginning the return trip, a gust of wind caught the support board and stood the frame up vertically. Well, for the second time in 10 years I got to sail a car for about 30 seconds until the bungee cords broke and the whole apparatus blew off backwards. Of course it was run over immediately and turned into matchwood as it landed. The whole event spoke a lot about preparation. That, and the value of having a spare portable crib, another of which I picked up at a yard sale when we got home.
So I hope that Sarah continues to do as well as she has so far, paying attention to the road around her, being paranoid about the other drivers, and respectful of the hunk of steel under her control. Because there is ALWAYS something radically unexpected about to happen while you are driving, and how well you have mastered the basics, committed them to memory, and trained your muscles to automatically respond while your brain solves the new crisis has a direct correspondence to whether your driving surprises result in charming anecdotes or in tragedy. And I would far rather that she have a whole bunch of stupid stories like mine as the only result of her unintended consequences.
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